On February 7, 1649 –one week after the
execution by decapitation of Charles I, his royal physician, William Harvey
(1578-1657), discoverer of the circulation of the blood, writes to his cousin, Edward
Francis, a lawyer, once his friend but now firmly in the camp of Cromwell. Harvey
muses on how his responsibilities as physician to the king must place him in
the royalist camp. But as a doctor he will tend to anybody – Every Body—because
all bodies are governed by the same natural laws. He wonders what his place
will be in the new political order. And he wonders if his cousin noticed him
when he stood by the king in battle – and if they will ever meet again in
friendship.

Approaching age 60 and childless, Fiona Maye is
a family court judge who must decide if 17 year-old Adam has the right to
refuse blood transfusions for his leukemia. He and his parents are Jehovah’s
Witnesses. The Children Act does not
allow a child to make this decision until age 18. Fiona is an atheist and her
35-year marriage to an academic is falling apart. She takes the extraordinary step of visiting
Adam to know him and understand his conviction. He is beautiful and gifted, he
writes poetry and plays violin. Why would he not want to try to live? She makes
her decision having no idea if it will be morally, legally or medically right. To say more would spoil it.

Frank
Drum, 13, and his younger brother Jake are catapulted into adulthood the summer
of 1961 in their small Minnesota town as they become involved in investigation
of a series of violent deaths. Their
father, a Methodist minister, and their mother, a singer and musician, can’t
protect them from knowing more than children perhaps should know about suicide,
mental illness, and unprovoked violence.
The story is Frank’s retrospective, 40 years later, on that summer and
its lasting impact on their family, including what he and his brother learned
about the complicated ways people are driven to violence and the equally
complicated range of ways people respond to violence and loss—grief, anger, depression,
and sometimes slow and discerning forgiveness.

In 1942, Beth Pierce was completing her
internship in the new discipline of occupational therapy in a Baltimore hospital
where she meets Jim, a conscientious objector who is training to become a medic.
They share a love of poetry and the arts. He goes off to war and serves in the foxholes
and trenches of the dreadful conditions at the front. She stays in North
America serving in rehabilitation with the war wounded – young men damaged
physically and mentally from the great trauma. Until 1945, they exchange a
remarkable series of letters that describe the war, their parallel work with
the war wounded, their hopes for the future, and gratitude for each other’s
thoughts. The letters always close with “Please write.”

“Tithonus” is a dramatic monologue that imagines the once
handsome, magnificent Trojan prince to be well-advanced in an unfortunate state
brought about by negligent gods and his own lack of foresight. Exultant over the blessings of his youth,
he’d asked Aurora, goddess of the dawn, for eternal life, and she had obtained
Zeus’s permission to grant the request.
But Tithonus had failed to ask for eternal youth with his immortality—and
neither Aurora nor Zeus had managed to recognize that this feature of the
request might be important—so that Tithonus spends eternity growing
increasingly decrepit. In Tennyson’s
poem, Tithonus addresses Aurora, hoping he might persuade her to reassign him
his mortal status and allow him to die.

Born in 1894, Grania becomes deaf following scarlet fever at the age of two. Her mother never quite recovers from misplaced guilt over this outcome and is withdrawn. But Grania is well loved by the whole family, who run a hotel in a small town. Her older sister and their Irish-born grandmother see the child's intelligence and find ways to communicate with her by signs and words; they urge the parents to send her to a special school.By age nine, Grania is sent to the famous School for the Deaf in Belleville Ontario, founded by Alexander Graham Bell. Although the school is only a short distance from her home on the north shore of Lake Ontario, the child is not allowed to return for nine long months. At first she is overwhelmed with homesickness, but soon she finds kindred spirits among the other students and teachers and adapts to the life of the institution.

By 1915, her studies complete, Grania works at the school. There, she meets her future husband, Jim, a hearing man who is assistant to the town doctor. They marry, but only two weeks later, Jim leaves to serve as a stretcher bearer in the war in Europe. Fear and death haunt the people at home and abroad for years. Jim writes what little he is allowed of the horror and danger around him, always promising to return. Grania waits and writes too, slowly growing hopeless and angry, as devastating telegrams arrive one after the other.Her sister copes with the return of a grievously disfigured husband, wounded more in mind than in body. In late 1918, Grania falls ill in the influenza epidemic and is delirious for weeks. When she recovers, frail and bald, she learns of the loss of her beloved grandmother who died of the fever caught by nursing her. At the same moment she hears of the war's end and begins to believe again in hope.

This annotation is based on a live performance presented by the Manhattan Theater Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater in New
York City that ran between April and June of 2016. The play was nominated for a 2016 Tony Award for best play, and Frank Langella won the 2016 Tony Award for best
performance by an actor in a leading role in a play. In supporting roles were
Kathryn Erbe, Brian Avers, Charles Borland, Hannah Cabell, and Kathleen
McNenny.

The Father is the story of an older man with
Alzheimer’s disease (André) and his progression through first living on his
own, then living with his daughter (Anne), and finally living in a nursing
home. Or, is it? It’s hard to tell, and that is the intention of the playwright,
Florian Zeller, who told The Guardian
(2015), “The Father is about an old man lost in the labyrinth of his mind.” The
objective of the play is to bring audience members into the actual dementia
experience so that rather than witnessing André’s disorientation they feel his disorientation.

The director, Doug Hughes, creates the audience
experience through an interplay among set designs, lighting effects, repeated
scene sequences, and time loops as contexts for various symptom manifestations
like memory loss, paranoia, anger, and lasciviousness. All the scenes take
place in one room that serves at different times as André’s flat, Anne’s flat,
and a nursing home room. The furnishings of the room change based on the
supposed setting, but the walls are exactly the same for all of them. In
different scenes, André is not always sure where he is, and neither is the
audience.

Early in the play, André hears Anne tell him
she’s relocating from Paris to London with her lover, but she is present to him in most of
the scenes thereafter and until the end of the play when he’s told by a nurse that Anne had
moved to London some time ago. Had she really left Paris and was never actually there in all those other scenes? He wonders and so does the audience. In other
scenes, the way characters from the past and present enter and exit distorts
time for André, and so while audience members know the linear trajectory of the
disease course, they can’t be sure of where they are in that course during a
given scene. With the last scene taking place in André’s nursing home room with
the same walls seen in his flat and Anne’s flat, the audience can’t be faulted
for wondering whether all that came before was just one of André’s
hallucinations.

The play does not keep audience members in a
perpetual state of confusion and despondency. Farcical elements are peppered
throughout that produce occasional laughs, such as when Anne contests André’s
account of a previous conversation, he suggests it’s she who has the memory
problem:
“You’ve forgotten. Listen, Anne, I have a feeling
you sometimes suffer from memory loss. You do, I’m telling you. It’s worrying
me. Haven’t you noticed?”

The
aim of these reflections on uncertainty in medicine is not to discredit
evidence-based medicine or to incite suspicion of the careful and caring
processes by which most clinicians arrive at the advice they give. Rather it is to change conversations among
practitioners and between them and their patients in such a way as to raise
everyone’s tolerance for the inevitable ambiguities and uncertainties we live
with. If the public were more aware of
the basic rules of mathematical probabilities, how statisticians understand the
term “significance,” and of how much changes when one new variable is taken
into account—when a new medication with multiple possible side-effects is added
to the mix, for instance—they might, Hatch argues, be less inclined to insist on
specific predictions. He goes on to
suggest that there is something to be gained from the challenge of living
without the solid ground of assurances.
When we recognize the need to make decisions with incomplete information
(a condition that seems, after all, to be our common lot) we may refocus on the
moment we’re in and see its peculiar possibilities. Changing the conversation
requires a critical look at medical education which, Hatch observes, “measures
a certain type of knowledge essential to medical practice, but it consequently
engenders a conception of medicine best described as overly certain . . . .”

Two harshly drawn figures make up this painting, an adult cradling
a baby. Both figures stare out and confront the viewer with round bulging eyes.
Their wide red mouths are drawn into grimaces, displaying long rows of teeth.
Their bodies are pale, but are outlined roughly in black, and marked by gashes
of blue, pink, and red. They stand, highlighted in yellow, against an angry and
energetic backdrop of red and orange.

A small black halo sticks out stiffly from the head of the
baby, while two sharp black horns protrude from the crown of the adult. The
adult’s disproportionately large thick hand presses the baby close to their
body. Is this an adult or is it a monster or a devil? The viewer is left to
decide. Whoever or whatever the figure is, it holds the baby in a way that is
protective and menacing at the same time.

In
1951, Eileen Tumulty, the novel’s main character, was nine years old and living
with her Irish immigrant parents in the Woodside section of Queens, New York. The
novel follows Eileen straight through the next 60 years, but concentrates on
the years covering the time of her husband’s Alzheimer’s disease.

Eileen
was forced to learn how to manage a household at a very young age when first
her mother was kept in a hospital for 8 months after a hysterectomy, and then
again when her mother became incapacitated by alcoholism. Eileen had reason to
think this life was her destiny until she accompanied her father to a better part
of Queens. There she saw “places…that contained more happiness than ordinary
places did.” She concluded, “unless you knew that such places existed, you
might be content to stay where you were.” (pp. 15-16) Eileen’s ambition was
ignited. While continuing to manage the household and care for her mother, she
does well in school, becomes a nurse, and eventually moves up the nursing
management at various hospitals.

Eileen’s
ambitions encompassed ideas on her eventual mate. She chooses Ed Leary despite
hoping for someone who was not quite so Irish and not quite so much of the same
place. Ed was a promising neuroscience graduate student who she thought could
be a high achiever with the right motivation: “If there was anything she could
help him with, it was thinking big.” (p. 97) Her motivation was not enough and
neither were the many offers he received from life science companies. He became
a professor at a local community college. He had a passion for teaching
students who attend community colleges and he could never see himself anywhere
else—for love or money. Ed’s intransigence frustrated Eileen, but she accepted
it and plowed ahead. She studied the possible ways of escaping the old
neighborhood and also delivered a son she thought she’d never have after years
of futile efforts.

It
doesn’t go smoothly. While she is getting surer of where they would go, Ed
begins to exhibit disconcerting behaviors. For them to live in Bronxville,
Eileen will have to accept a house that needs a lot of money and attention to
rehabilitate. The remainder of the story is about how Eileen simultaneously
manages Ed’s rapid deterioration from what eventually is diagnosed as
Alzheimer’s disease, her job requirements, and a son progressing from
adolescence through college.
We Are Not
Ourselves touches on many of the
aspects involved in prolonged illness including the daily struggles managing
the care of someone with progressive dementia, complexities of health care
delivery systems, frustrations with byzantine health care coverage, and threats
to relationships among the individual family members with one another, and the
grace that can manifest during the bleakest moments. The author does not dwell
on all these issues, but gives them enough attention so that their effects will
be recognizable to many readers who have experienced them. In doing so, he was able to draw from his own
experiences with his father who was stricken with early onset Alzheimer’s
disease.